Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Ideally amicable: beauty and behaviour (Part 1)

Those citizen science projects in your last post were completely awesome – I still can’t decide if the slowed down baby laughter sound is hilarious or scary! Not sure I’d want to hear my kid’s giggle turned into Uncle Fester’s slow-play snicker is all I’m saying.

Looking at those babies’ behaviour, we can obviously tell they are happy little campers, but what assessments can be made about dog behaviour? More importantly, what are the behaviours that contribute to dogs thriving and living happily as modern-day companion dogs and members of our families?

The Anthrozoology research group considered this question a few years back. We often have discussion about dogs with our science goggles on (no, not literally – we don’t even wear lab coats! *snicker*). We talked about the idea of dogs having their behaviour scored and assessed in the same (best practice) way as their hips/elbows/eyes/insert physical trait are prior to breeding. Wouldn't that be amazing? This would be more than simply a breed standard description (e.g. Lhasa Apso: “Gay and assertive, but chary of strangers”; Dalmatian: "stable and outgoing, yet dignified",AKC breed standards), as you touched on in an earlier post. This would be an actual assessment of an individual dog’s behaviour.

This could be such a helpful tool. For potential owners (e.g. check out the documented behaviour profiles of the individual parents before purchasing a pup), for local councils (e.g. could help them better manage the dogs living in their community, including the dangerous ones), breeders, trainers, shelters, etc. etc. etc.

Tammie and her dog Kade

Tammie King was part of those discussions and her research is taking on this huge piece of big-picture pie, head first. Tammie began her PhD journey wanting to improve our capacity to accurately and objectively assess canine behaviour with the goal of improving transparency of the types of dogs we have (own/breed) in our communities. This is a continuously challenging area of study and one of significance for many sectors of our society.

There are already plenty of behaviour assessments in existence. The problem is that they’re all trying to measure different things, in different ways, guided by different ethics (specifically regarding eliciting aggression), using different equipment and different assessors in all different scenarios in varying parts of the world. Many have not been evaluated regarding their effectiveness. As scientists, we’d like to limit variability by producing an objective (not biased), standardised assessment which has been shown to be valid (accurate), reliable (repeatable by different people on different occasions) and is feasible (can be safely used by a range of organisations).

That sounds easy!

Does it? Awesome! What would you measure? Objectively, remember. How would you score it? What would you use in your test to prompt the behaviour that informs your assessment? Keep in mind the assessment needs to have a practical time frame to be useful in a real-world context. What would you involve in your protocol? The owner? A stranger? Another dog? A small child? Food? Cats? Penguins? Wait!

You’re right. It’s not an easy task. Tammie decided to tackle this the way we all should take on any big task – by breaking it down into manageable pieces. She started by asking “WHAT should my assessment be measuring?” Rather than just take a stab in the dark, Tammie took the question to the masses and asked the Australian public what their ‘ideal’ dog would be.

Nearly 1,000 people took her online survey and it turns out that most people seem to want dogs which are friendly, easy going, safe with children, affectionate, etc. When it comes to dogs living as companion animals, most people do not want the traditionally bred purpose-type dogs, i.e. hunting/guard/herding dogs (Oh hush your protests, this is what the data said, not what Tammie or I are personally saying).

Instead, in these current times, most people in Australia want what a dog that can be categorised as AMICABLE.

Amicable is ideal?

The next stage of Tammie’s research involved developing a behaviour assessment specifically designed to measure the canine personality trait, amicability.

I’ll tell you more about all of that next time. But I’d love to hear your thoughts - what do you think the most common role of dog is these days? Should we be breeding dogs for beauty and behaviour in their role as modern companion animals?